Rambo Jesus

The American nation . . . is engaged at this very hour in an attempt . . . to Christianize every phase of a righteous war waged to save the life of democracy,” Lieutenant George Stewart Jr. and Henry B. Wright, the YMCA’s liaison to the military, wrote in 1917-18, in support of World War I (The Practice of Friendship). Stewart and Wright called Jesus to their side. “For new recruits,” they wrote, “inevitably there comes a day of testing—a day when men’s souls are tried as by fire—the first day of the bayonet drill.”